So she is gone and buried. Margaret Thatcher's long shadow is slowly fading at last. Her legacy: 11 years of hurt, 10 long days of sycophancy and fawning, and over 30 years of an ideological stranglehold on what counts these days as "the common ground" of politics.
For those who haven't lived through the nineteen eighties, it must seem very strange that a rather severe-looking but otherwise unremarkable old woman should inspire such reverence on the one hand and such loathing on the other. What's the fuss all about?
Today, as she is laid to rest (to ascend to heaven, or burn in hell), the media will tell us over and over again that this is a historic occasion, history in the making, etc. We on the political left (a dying breed with a romantic attachment to lost causes such as social justice and compassion) owe it to history to make sure that dissent and protest do not go unnoticed. If we allow the image of the sobbing slavering masses to worship at the altar of the goddess /queen who united the nation in collective grief and mourning, then we have failed to do our job. It is our duty to ensure that this mythical vision of Gloriana and Churchill rolled into one is not allowed to stand; we need to bear witness to the reality of Thatcher the destroyer of communities, of social cohesion, of hope and aspiration for millions of people. We cannot stand by and allow the right to hijack history, to shape a consensus reality of the heroic warrior-queen, vanquishing British trade unions and Argentinian generals alike, staunch defender of global "freedom" (the freedom to consort with Chilean dictators and South African apologists for Apartheid), defender of the nation, mother of the free...
But even this dissenting view will only partly put the record straight. If we were able to take a truly historic perspective and look back on today from a century or so in the future, we might get a very different take on it all. We may come to see Thatcher not so much as a trailblazer but more as an enabler, the person who started to lay the foundations for what was to follow - a full-scale attack on people's absolute right to be regarded as a full citizen within British society, rather than a relative right linked to their ability to pay their way. We will come to see her as the harbinger of that great sea-change in civic society, where the state ceased to protect the vulnerable and the poor, where the great common goods of society were flogged off to the highest bidder, where the notions of compassion and solidarity were ruled out of court as legitimate state concerns, where everything was for sale and nothing was sacred.
Thatcher is a side-show compared to what this current government is doing to this country. Whereas Thatcher was an ideologue, but cunningly pragmatic in how she managed the pace of change she wanted to force through, this government is a cabal of ideologues who have far less regard for the "collateral damage" caused by their slash-and-burn politics, where whole swathes of "unproductive" communities are laid to waste (the poor and the children of the poor, the dispossessed, public servants, the disabled). They are determined to push through their dismantling of the state at breakneck speed, as they realise they probably only have one term in office to do so.
Having bought off half the parliamentary opposition, with the official opposition bereft of alternative ideas and narrowly focused on winning marginal seats to get back into power to then perpetuate the "Thatcherite settlement", they are using the cover of the need for "austerity" to ram through an ultra-thatcherite "shock doctrine" programme of public sector divestment. Osborne is busily destroying the livelihoods of 800,000 public sector workers, Hunt is happily selling off the NHS piecemeal, and Gove is racing against time to start privatising state education (if in any doubt, read Suemas Milne's excellent Guardian Comment Is Free article).
So what, ultimately, are this state funeral and the apotheosis of Thatcher all about? Is it, as many commentators believe, a cynical ploy by David Cameron to use £10 million pounds of our money so he can bask in the reflected glory of the Great Leader now departed, to lay claim to her political legacy, to legitimise his position with his own party right wing, to reinforce the free-market Conservative Party creation myth?
No, I think something far more insidious is going on. I believe Cameron is using this occasion as a smokescreen to divert attention from his own scorched earth policies. By resurrecting the memory of the bad old days, by confronting the nation with the imagery of "that bloody woman" being loathed by the left and stabbed in the back by her own party, he is able to deflect public scrutiny of his own programme of destruction, and mask his true political savagery by being made to appear reasonable, moderate and statesmanlike in comparison with this strident harridan...
So, even in death, the "real" essence of Margaret Thatcher is still being fought over by left and right, commentators and intellectuals alike, and each one of us assigns a different meaning to this empty vessel called "Margaret Thatcher". We all create her anew in our own image every day. But the real, physical Thatcher is dead, and we are alive and we survive to carry on our everyday struggle against the carnage being waged by her successors, the wizards of destruction.
Wednesday, 17 April 2013
Thursday, 18 October 2012
Wages For Housework 1
I've been familiar with the notion of wages for housework for the last thirty years. I've always been sympathetic to the idea without ever having to think about it - I just got on with my working life, as did most of my friends, male and female alike. I worked, I joined unions, I went on strike, I swapped jobs for other better paid or more fulfilling jobs. I got married, my wife left her job, we had children, I went down to well-paid part-time work and, eventually, I moved into self-employment or, as it really should be called in these recessionary times, underemployment.
I've mentioned the words "work", "jobs" and "employment" several times in the opening paragraph, but what I'm really talking about here is PAID work or employment. The easy use of the language of "work" betrays the underlying assumption that holds sway within our modern capitalist society - only purposeful activity (labour) that is exchanged for money (capital) is deserving of the concept of "work". Any other activity, no matter how well intentioned or productive, that is done "for free", can't be work. Because this is "work" that can't possibly be measured; and if it cannot be measured, if it does not have a cost or a price, then it can't have any economic value either.
And so we all, in our own ways, are complicit with the silent conspiracy: there is "proper" work (often referred to as "wealth creation") and there is "improper" work (often referred to as "not working" or "sponging off the state").
Traditionally, the domain of "work" has been seen as a male domain. The domain of "non-work" has traditionally been female. The main political challenges to the prevailing economic order have traditionally been fought within the work domain. For over two centuries trade unions have fought to protect and improve the employment and human rights of all workers. More recently, the feminist movement has fought to put women on an equal footing with men, particularly in the workplace.
But there have always been voices speaking out for those who do not fit into the work domain, those working-age adults who don't participate in the labour market: the marginalised, the demonised, the ones who, in time-honoured Tory folklore, spend their idle days watching daytime television. These are the disabled, those struggling with physical and mental health problems, and - most threatening of all, because they actually have the choice to go out and work if they only so desired - carers and homemakers throughout the land...
If you are in paid work, it could be surprisingly easy to sign up to this dominant worldview, where people are either deserving of money (a whole swathe of working society stretching to the dizzy heights of the "idle rich") or undeserving (the rest of us "non-workers" stretching all the way down to "benefit scroungers"). But what happens if you are suddenly catapulted out from the comfort of the deserving into the nightmare realm of the undeserving, when all the flimsy props that kept you in your allotted place in the scheme of things crumble to dust around you - when all of a sudden you are confronted with the spectre of redundancy or disability or mental breakdown, when you are no longer a "worker"?
That's when you are confronted with real work at its most naked - the tasks we all have to do because they have to be done, because we can't pay anyone to do them for us, and if they didn't get done, the results would be catastrophic. Of course, they've been there all the time, and we have always done them or had them done for us, but they were never seen as having any "value" in themselves. And now, we need to find a way of valuing them, so that we can continue to value ourselves; we need to "valorise" and validate the domain of housework and caring for ourselves and others.
(to be continued)
I've mentioned the words "work", "jobs" and "employment" several times in the opening paragraph, but what I'm really talking about here is PAID work or employment. The easy use of the language of "work" betrays the underlying assumption that holds sway within our modern capitalist society - only purposeful activity (labour) that is exchanged for money (capital) is deserving of the concept of "work". Any other activity, no matter how well intentioned or productive, that is done "for free", can't be work. Because this is "work" that can't possibly be measured; and if it cannot be measured, if it does not have a cost or a price, then it can't have any economic value either.
And so we all, in our own ways, are complicit with the silent conspiracy: there is "proper" work (often referred to as "wealth creation") and there is "improper" work (often referred to as "not working" or "sponging off the state").
Traditionally, the domain of "work" has been seen as a male domain. The domain of "non-work" has traditionally been female. The main political challenges to the prevailing economic order have traditionally been fought within the work domain. For over two centuries trade unions have fought to protect and improve the employment and human rights of all workers. More recently, the feminist movement has fought to put women on an equal footing with men, particularly in the workplace.
But there have always been voices speaking out for those who do not fit into the work domain, those working-age adults who don't participate in the labour market: the marginalised, the demonised, the ones who, in time-honoured Tory folklore, spend their idle days watching daytime television. These are the disabled, those struggling with physical and mental health problems, and - most threatening of all, because they actually have the choice to go out and work if they only so desired - carers and homemakers throughout the land...
If you are in paid work, it could be surprisingly easy to sign up to this dominant worldview, where people are either deserving of money (a whole swathe of working society stretching to the dizzy heights of the "idle rich") or undeserving (the rest of us "non-workers" stretching all the way down to "benefit scroungers"). But what happens if you are suddenly catapulted out from the comfort of the deserving into the nightmare realm of the undeserving, when all the flimsy props that kept you in your allotted place in the scheme of things crumble to dust around you - when all of a sudden you are confronted with the spectre of redundancy or disability or mental breakdown, when you are no longer a "worker"?
That's when you are confronted with real work at its most naked - the tasks we all have to do because they have to be done, because we can't pay anyone to do them for us, and if they didn't get done, the results would be catastrophic. Of course, they've been there all the time, and we have always done them or had them done for us, but they were never seen as having any "value" in themselves. And now, we need to find a way of valuing them, so that we can continue to value ourselves; we need to "valorise" and validate the domain of housework and caring for ourselves and others.
(to be continued)
Sunday, 9 September 2012
Embracing the Good-Enough
Like everyone else in Britain and around the world, I have been following the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games with awe and wonder. From the Olympic opening ceremony onwards, I have been impressed, moved and inspired by the drive and achievement shown by all the athletes. I have been swept up in the many personal stories of dedication, determination and achievement, often in the face of adversity.
We can all identify with these stories, as they mirror our own struggles to give meaning and direction to our lives, to strive, to never give up, to achieve our goals. We can all see ourselves constantly pushing towards the higher, longer, faster... We can all celebrate this universal yearning to become still better than we are, to grow and to succeed.
Elite athletes spend their entire lives pushing their boundaries, stretching their performance that little bit further, never being satisfied with where they are now and constantly focused on the next personal best, the next world record. Their lives are a continual struggle to improve their performance, to reach the next level, to live as if there are no limits to their potential.
The rest of us are not elite athletes, yet we are being forced to behave as if we were. The language of our social and political discourse is all about performance, targets and goals. We are constantly exhorted to work harder, smarter, leaner. Whatever we have achieved today, it is never good enough. Management by objectives, public spending targets, improved productivity. Every day we are targeted, incentivised, monitored, evaluated and ultimately found wanting. We haven't done enough, we haven't worked quite hard enough to succeed, we must do better.
We are forced to live in an individual performance culture, where we are responsible for our own success. We have internalised these cultural values; like the Stakhanovite horse Boxer in George Orwell's Animal Farm, we feel that "we must work harder" to succeed even in the face of overwhelming odds. And if we fail, well then it can only be our fault. We just didn't try hard enough, we didn't want it enough, we didn't transcend our limitations - of poverty, of physical and mental ability, of educational attainment, of social status.
Being made to think and feel like this is a gross violation of our human right to be satisfied with our lives as they are, to be happy in the present, to lead a 'good life', to recognise that there are limits to our abilities. There is no long-term happiness in constantly striving to be better than you are - we may find our happiness in accepting who we are and celebrating our own intrinsic value as a human being instead. Swap the negative mindset of failure against a future 'better self' ("I'm simply not good enough") to the liberating mindset of just being who you are - and you are 'good enough' in all your present glory.
We can all identify with these stories, as they mirror our own struggles to give meaning and direction to our lives, to strive, to never give up, to achieve our goals. We can all see ourselves constantly pushing towards the higher, longer, faster... We can all celebrate this universal yearning to become still better than we are, to grow and to succeed.
Elite athletes spend their entire lives pushing their boundaries, stretching their performance that little bit further, never being satisfied with where they are now and constantly focused on the next personal best, the next world record. Their lives are a continual struggle to improve their performance, to reach the next level, to live as if there are no limits to their potential.
The rest of us are not elite athletes, yet we are being forced to behave as if we were. The language of our social and political discourse is all about performance, targets and goals. We are constantly exhorted to work harder, smarter, leaner. Whatever we have achieved today, it is never good enough. Management by objectives, public spending targets, improved productivity. Every day we are targeted, incentivised, monitored, evaluated and ultimately found wanting. We haven't done enough, we haven't worked quite hard enough to succeed, we must do better.
We are forced to live in an individual performance culture, where we are responsible for our own success. We have internalised these cultural values; like the Stakhanovite horse Boxer in George Orwell's Animal Farm, we feel that "we must work harder" to succeed even in the face of overwhelming odds. And if we fail, well then it can only be our fault. We just didn't try hard enough, we didn't want it enough, we didn't transcend our limitations - of poverty, of physical and mental ability, of educational attainment, of social status.
Being made to think and feel like this is a gross violation of our human right to be satisfied with our lives as they are, to be happy in the present, to lead a 'good life', to recognise that there are limits to our abilities. There is no long-term happiness in constantly striving to be better than you are - we may find our happiness in accepting who we are and celebrating our own intrinsic value as a human being instead. Swap the negative mindset of failure against a future 'better self' ("I'm simply not good enough") to the liberating mindset of just being who you are - and you are 'good enough' in all your present glory.
Sunday, 11 March 2012
Britain And The Slave Trade
Some weeks ago, there were horrifying stories in the news about members of the traveller community keeping vulnerable young men as slaves, coercing them into working long hours for nothing. Then there was an expose of illegal immigrants, men, women and children, being kept in servitude in appalling shanty-town housing at the backs of West London semis, any money they earned taken from them in overblown rent payments by their traffickers.
Thankfully, we can continue to sleep easy; as we turn over in our beds and snuggle down, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that these are isolated acts performed by shady foreign types on their own people. We can demonise these communities to our heart's content and abdicate any responsibility for their care. And even better, we can bolster our self-image as fine upstanding British citizens who are above this sort of thing.
And yet, and yet...
While we have been so blissfully asleep, a whole UK slave society has sprung up in our midst and we haven't even noticed (too easily distracted into demonising Johnny Foreigner). Not only that, we seem to think that this slave society is a good thing. Thousands of people are being forced to work for nothing and kept in check by threats to remove the meagre survival rations they have been given by their gangmasters. And their government-sponsored gangmasters have been incredibly successful at placing their labour not with seedy back street sweatshops or isolated farms, but with leading high street stores and supermarkets.
The current economic crisis is now clearly so bad that our own government has seen fit to replace the capitalist mode of production (free exchange between capital and labour) with the so-called oriental mode of production (based on slave labour and despotic power). The goverment's work programme (let's call this criminal enterprise by its real name) is a tacit admission that the free market capitalism so beloved by the Tories has failed. The government is now actively interfering in the labour market by supplying willing takers with free labour. It has taken away the one remaining vestige of dignity left to thousands of people on the edge: their right to sell their labour (the only thing they have left to sell) for a fair price. These people are not even commodities any more, they are simply slaves, kept alive on implausibly low benefits to keep them just above starvation levels so they can continue to do the one and only thing they are good for: to work and work and work until they drop, to be replaced by the next wave of unwilling un-volunteers from the reserve army of labour (aka the unemployed).
And the great selling point of this post-capitalist, post-apocalyptic economic wonderland is this: their numbers just keep on rising! Just as the Thatcher governments of the eighties were determined to root out trade unionism by eradicating the hubs of trade union activity (mining and the manufacturing industry), this current blue tory/yellow tory government is determined to decimate the last remaining bastion of trade union activity in this country: the public sector. Trade unionists and their fellow workers who have fought for centuries to improve the working rights and conditions of every man, woman and child in this country are to be laid low by taking away their most basic working right: the righ to work for a fair wage.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel: our government has been rumbled. What started as a small but very effective campaigning effort quickly led to a groundswell of opinion against what was happening. As usual, nothing was likely to threaten the different workfare programmes whilst its critics were attacking it from a political standpoint. But only when the slave-owners themselves (Tesco, Sainsbury's et al) finally woke up to the threat this controversy could pose to their brands and reputations, fearing a consumer backlash, things started to unravel quickly. You know that the game is up when the Employment Minister, Chris Grayling, starts to bleat on about the Socialist Workers Party having hacked his email acount, rather than argue on the issues.
But beware: workfare is not dead. I suspect it is merely going through a rebranding exercise (to detoxify its current image) and sooner or later it will be relaunched as a softer, more fragrant version. We must remain vigilant and make sure we don't have the (softer, sweeter) wool pulled over our eyes again.
To finish for today (I will come back to this again), I would like to quote the following three paragraphs by Deborah Orr in the Guardian 25 February 2012, which encapsulate a lot of the thinking I have tried to put into this post:
So much for the dignity of labour.
Thankfully, we can continue to sleep easy; as we turn over in our beds and snuggle down, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that these are isolated acts performed by shady foreign types on their own people. We can demonise these communities to our heart's content and abdicate any responsibility for their care. And even better, we can bolster our self-image as fine upstanding British citizens who are above this sort of thing.
And yet, and yet...
While we have been so blissfully asleep, a whole UK slave society has sprung up in our midst and we haven't even noticed (too easily distracted into demonising Johnny Foreigner). Not only that, we seem to think that this slave society is a good thing. Thousands of people are being forced to work for nothing and kept in check by threats to remove the meagre survival rations they have been given by their gangmasters. And their government-sponsored gangmasters have been incredibly successful at placing their labour not with seedy back street sweatshops or isolated farms, but with leading high street stores and supermarkets.
The current economic crisis is now clearly so bad that our own government has seen fit to replace the capitalist mode of production (free exchange between capital and labour) with the so-called oriental mode of production (based on slave labour and despotic power). The goverment's work programme (let's call this criminal enterprise by its real name) is a tacit admission that the free market capitalism so beloved by the Tories has failed. The government is now actively interfering in the labour market by supplying willing takers with free labour. It has taken away the one remaining vestige of dignity left to thousands of people on the edge: their right to sell their labour (the only thing they have left to sell) for a fair price. These people are not even commodities any more, they are simply slaves, kept alive on implausibly low benefits to keep them just above starvation levels so they can continue to do the one and only thing they are good for: to work and work and work until they drop, to be replaced by the next wave of unwilling un-volunteers from the reserve army of labour (aka the unemployed).
And the great selling point of this post-capitalist, post-apocalyptic economic wonderland is this: their numbers just keep on rising! Just as the Thatcher governments of the eighties were determined to root out trade unionism by eradicating the hubs of trade union activity (mining and the manufacturing industry), this current blue tory/yellow tory government is determined to decimate the last remaining bastion of trade union activity in this country: the public sector. Trade unionists and their fellow workers who have fought for centuries to improve the working rights and conditions of every man, woman and child in this country are to be laid low by taking away their most basic working right: the righ to work for a fair wage.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel: our government has been rumbled. What started as a small but very effective campaigning effort quickly led to a groundswell of opinion against what was happening. As usual, nothing was likely to threaten the different workfare programmes whilst its critics were attacking it from a political standpoint. But only when the slave-owners themselves (Tesco, Sainsbury's et al) finally woke up to the threat this controversy could pose to their brands and reputations, fearing a consumer backlash, things started to unravel quickly. You know that the game is up when the Employment Minister, Chris Grayling, starts to bleat on about the Socialist Workers Party having hacked his email acount, rather than argue on the issues.
But beware: workfare is not dead. I suspect it is merely going through a rebranding exercise (to detoxify its current image) and sooner or later it will be relaunched as a softer, more fragrant version. We must remain vigilant and make sure we don't have the (softer, sweeter) wool pulled over our eyes again.
To finish for today (I will come back to this again), I would like to quote the following three paragraphs by Deborah Orr in the Guardian 25 February 2012, which encapsulate a lot of the thinking I have tried to put into this post:
"For the [political] right,(...) hapless, inefficient intervention by the state [in labour markets] is anathema. When the private sector is left to make its own arrangements, neo-liberals never tire of pointing out, it functions bettter, to the advantage of all. The left? Well, the left is always keen to cheerlead for state intervention, no matter how perverse the outcome might be.
"The fact that the opposite is happening during the rowdy debate over 'workfare' is testament to just how dysfunctional the whole issue has become. In the case of the work programme, it is the right, counter-intuitively, which is lining up to argue in favour of state involvement in the employment market. The left is rather less enthusiastic, to say the least. Suddenly, the Conservative party is not remotely interested in letting the market decide. In fact, it is clutching its pearls at the shocking suggestion that market decisions mean anything at all.
"The market decided long, long ago, for example, that work as a shop assistant is not deserving of a very high salary. A low salary tends to indicate low-status work (unfortunately). The Conservative party appears to believe that even a modest wage is more than an honest day's toil in the aisles of a supermarket is necessarily worth. People, the coalition appears to think, ought to be very happy to do this work at no cost to the organisation making a profit from the labour, in the hope that at some point in the future the experience gained from this work placement can be parlayed into a job."
So much for the dignity of labour.
Saturday, 14 January 2012
Overchoice I
Christmas always offers a window on our brave new consumerist world. Even in the midst of recession and austerity, people still cannot escape the urge to shop. Even in the midst of recession and austerity, the government actively urges them to shop so that the powers that be can batten down on any positive statistic to peddle the illusion of economic recovery. Even in the midst of recession and austerity, we still fall for this con trick and out we go, in our droves, to pay homage to the great consumerist god and buy our way to salvation.
And when we get to the shops, or when we get to the supermarket, we stand frozen in the aisles as we are confronted by thousands of choices for anything and everything. This is the paradox of our consumerist society: by giving us what we think we want/they decide we want in every shape, size, colour, quality and price, they have given us the burden of choice. And each choice demands a decision. And each decision demands a process of working out (a) what you think you want and (b) what you really need and (c) what your selection criteria are and (d) what you are prepared to pay and (e) can you get it more cheaply elsewhere and (f) oh I can't be bothered anymore, it's doing my head in.
So think of your average expedition to your local super/hyper/mega/gigamarket, think of the 100 or so different items you have to locate on your weekly shop in the massive, overlit, echoing, overcrowded, soulless hangar where this phantasmagoria of consumer choices is displayed in endless aisles of labelled categories (aka a warehouse) - you are tramping from one decision point to another a hundred times over. Each decision is fraught with fear and uncertainty: too much salt, too much sugar, too many calories, can I heat it in the oven, can I freeze it, should I buy two for one, three for two, none for any, much too much, oh my god! Tilt!
This is the brave new world of consumer choice and convenience. In the early 1970s, the American futurologist Alvin Toffler published his seminal book Future Shock. In it he predicted that the global capitalist system would eventually result in a state of overchoice. Overchoice is a direct threat to mental health, it is the condition where the human brain is physiologically unable to process the information required to make an informed decision. Your decision-making powers become paralysed, your brain becomes overloaded and you have to withdraw from the decision situation to recover.
That's why shopping has become so stressful. The consumerist model of consumption that has ruled the Western world for the last 30 years has spiralled out of control: shopping has become the new opium of the masses and people's lives have been sacrificed on the altar of consumer choice.
And when we get to the shops, or when we get to the supermarket, we stand frozen in the aisles as we are confronted by thousands of choices for anything and everything. This is the paradox of our consumerist society: by giving us what we think we want/they decide we want in every shape, size, colour, quality and price, they have given us the burden of choice. And each choice demands a decision. And each decision demands a process of working out (a) what you think you want and (b) what you really need and (c) what your selection criteria are and (d) what you are prepared to pay and (e) can you get it more cheaply elsewhere and (f) oh I can't be bothered anymore, it's doing my head in.
So think of your average expedition to your local super/hyper/mega/gigamarket, think of the 100 or so different items you have to locate on your weekly shop in the massive, overlit, echoing, overcrowded, soulless hangar where this phantasmagoria of consumer choices is displayed in endless aisles of labelled categories (aka a warehouse) - you are tramping from one decision point to another a hundred times over. Each decision is fraught with fear and uncertainty: too much salt, too much sugar, too many calories, can I heat it in the oven, can I freeze it, should I buy two for one, three for two, none for any, much too much, oh my god! Tilt!
This is the brave new world of consumer choice and convenience. In the early 1970s, the American futurologist Alvin Toffler published his seminal book Future Shock. In it he predicted that the global capitalist system would eventually result in a state of overchoice. Overchoice is a direct threat to mental health, it is the condition where the human brain is physiologically unable to process the information required to make an informed decision. Your decision-making powers become paralysed, your brain becomes overloaded and you have to withdraw from the decision situation to recover.
That's why shopping has become so stressful. The consumerist model of consumption that has ruled the Western world for the last 30 years has spiralled out of control: shopping has become the new opium of the masses and people's lives have been sacrificed on the altar of consumer choice.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! So we finally got through December. This is always a difficult month in our household as we do not only have Christmas to contend with, but two family birthdays as well. To me, the whole month is a period of continuous stress. We are already flat out managing the day-to-day business of living and then we get the chance to celebrate the festive spirit by doubling our workload. There is a palpable sense of relief when we finally stumble across the finishing line and Christmas proper is upon us...
If at all possible, we intend to seek out some winter sun this year and let the whole rigmarole carry on without us; but I'm sure I will be dispensing my usual cheery allotment of bah humbug again this time next year.
We have always been careful not to get caught up in the Christmas spending frenzy but, as the children have got older over the years, it has got progressively harder to hold out against the demands of peer pressure and the consumerist state.
One of our fondest memories of Christmas giving dates back to when our children were still quite young and we were staying in a hotel near my in-laws on Christmas day. Having spirited the main presents away at my in-laws house for later that day, we had left the Christmas stockings up in our room. In the morning, the kids were beaming with delight to find their half a dozen stocking fillers, not even aware that there were bigger presents still to come, until we told them.
In my more reflective moods, I sometimes think that that was the very last moment of true innocence, and the start of that gradual process when our relationship with the world of things and possessions begins to change - when we become acquisitive human beings and come to rely so much on our possessions to give us our sense of security in the world.
If at all possible, we intend to seek out some winter sun this year and let the whole rigmarole carry on without us; but I'm sure I will be dispensing my usual cheery allotment of bah humbug again this time next year.
We have always been careful not to get caught up in the Christmas spending frenzy but, as the children have got older over the years, it has got progressively harder to hold out against the demands of peer pressure and the consumerist state.
One of our fondest memories of Christmas giving dates back to when our children were still quite young and we were staying in a hotel near my in-laws on Christmas day. Having spirited the main presents away at my in-laws house for later that day, we had left the Christmas stockings up in our room. In the morning, the kids were beaming with delight to find their half a dozen stocking fillers, not even aware that there were bigger presents still to come, until we told them.
In my more reflective moods, I sometimes think that that was the very last moment of true innocence, and the start of that gradual process when our relationship with the world of things and possessions begins to change - when we become acquisitive human beings and come to rely so much on our possessions to give us our sense of security in the world.
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Waiting
We are losing our ability to wait. As our modern world becomes ever more responsive to our every need, and is able to fulfill our every wish almost immediately 24/7, we have come to expect instant gratification and get stressed when we don't receive it straightaway. We want it all and we want it now and you know what...we can have it (subject to status, terms and conditions apply)!
In today's marketplace, companies compete on time. We live in an era when product quality is pretty standard and most things have become commodities, where globalisation has shifted the costs of producing things to the cheapest possible places, where a lot of things we buy are not 'things' in the traditional sense at all (where we buy time in the real world so we can spend more of it leading virtual lives in virtual worlds), and where our rate of consumption continues to accelerate. We can have it good, we can have it cheap, now if only we can have it faster...
And so the treadmill speeds up all the time: we cycle through more stuff at ever increasing speed. And as we do so, the things with which we have an ever more fleeting acquaintance (buy, use, dispose) lose their solidity, their magic, their 'thingness' as they light up our lives for a nanosecond before scattering in a shower of evanescent sparks. As the essence drains out of the things that once gave meaning to our lives, the things that had duration and staid with us sometimes for generations, the things you really got to know, our relationship with our physical universe is changing too.
In the old wisdom veiled by the mists of time (well, twenty to thirty years ago at least) we were led to believe that things were worth waiting for. The very act of waiting, whether it was for a new toy, losing your virginity or deciding on a major life change, imbued that experience with a kind of otherworldly magic, gave it some real intrinsic value. The mere fact that there was a gap in time between a wish and its fulfilment gave you the space to reflect on what it was you wanted; the length of the wait was often seen as an indicator of the importance of what you wanted: did you really want this thing, how badly did you want it, was it a real need or just a want?.
Of course, this process of anticipation, of deferred gratification, often led to frustration and ultimate disappointment ("is that all it is? - not quite what it is cracked up to be!".) but it also gave an aura, a mystique to the universe of things and experiences. The very act of waiting for something gave intrinsic value to the thing we were waiting for.
Sometimes, life forces us to pause, to spend time waiting for our lives to start moving forward again - we need to respect this. The major turning points in our lives will often require us to stand still for a while and reflect on where we are going next: preparing for parenthood, grieving over the death of a loved one, periods of convalescence, depression, loss of faith, loss of confidence. These are the moments of pure waiting. We can't even begin to think about what we are waiting for; the future is still unformed, pregnant with possibility but deferred, still gestating, awaiting (re) birth.
Doris Lessing wrote very powerfully about these experiences of pure waiting, of the waiting for something to happen, in her Martha Quest series of books. Martha gives herself up to the waiting, embraces it and uses that breathing space to discover what really matters in her life. And in this vacuum, invisible unfelt energies are battling, coalescing and scattering to gradually bring forth a new life and a new direction. In this seemingly empty space between wishing and doing, Martha lives in the realm of being, waiting for her true life to reveal itself.
As we continue to squeeze the waiting out of our lives, as we continue to spin faster and faster in our daily rounds of busyness, we risk losing these opportunities for insight and growth simply by refusing to wait.
In today's marketplace, companies compete on time. We live in an era when product quality is pretty standard and most things have become commodities, where globalisation has shifted the costs of producing things to the cheapest possible places, where a lot of things we buy are not 'things' in the traditional sense at all (where we buy time in the real world so we can spend more of it leading virtual lives in virtual worlds), and where our rate of consumption continues to accelerate. We can have it good, we can have it cheap, now if only we can have it faster...
And so the treadmill speeds up all the time: we cycle through more stuff at ever increasing speed. And as we do so, the things with which we have an ever more fleeting acquaintance (buy, use, dispose) lose their solidity, their magic, their 'thingness' as they light up our lives for a nanosecond before scattering in a shower of evanescent sparks. As the essence drains out of the things that once gave meaning to our lives, the things that had duration and staid with us sometimes for generations, the things you really got to know, our relationship with our physical universe is changing too.
In the old wisdom veiled by the mists of time (well, twenty to thirty years ago at least) we were led to believe that things were worth waiting for. The very act of waiting, whether it was for a new toy, losing your virginity or deciding on a major life change, imbued that experience with a kind of otherworldly magic, gave it some real intrinsic value. The mere fact that there was a gap in time between a wish and its fulfilment gave you the space to reflect on what it was you wanted; the length of the wait was often seen as an indicator of the importance of what you wanted: did you really want this thing, how badly did you want it, was it a real need or just a want?.
Of course, this process of anticipation, of deferred gratification, often led to frustration and ultimate disappointment ("is that all it is? - not quite what it is cracked up to be!".) but it also gave an aura, a mystique to the universe of things and experiences. The very act of waiting for something gave intrinsic value to the thing we were waiting for.
Sometimes, life forces us to pause, to spend time waiting for our lives to start moving forward again - we need to respect this. The major turning points in our lives will often require us to stand still for a while and reflect on where we are going next: preparing for parenthood, grieving over the death of a loved one, periods of convalescence, depression, loss of faith, loss of confidence. These are the moments of pure waiting. We can't even begin to think about what we are waiting for; the future is still unformed, pregnant with possibility but deferred, still gestating, awaiting (re) birth.
Doris Lessing wrote very powerfully about these experiences of pure waiting, of the waiting for something to happen, in her Martha Quest series of books. Martha gives herself up to the waiting, embraces it and uses that breathing space to discover what really matters in her life. And in this vacuum, invisible unfelt energies are battling, coalescing and scattering to gradually bring forth a new life and a new direction. In this seemingly empty space between wishing and doing, Martha lives in the realm of being, waiting for her true life to reveal itself.
As we continue to squeeze the waiting out of our lives, as we continue to spin faster and faster in our daily rounds of busyness, we risk losing these opportunities for insight and growth simply by refusing to wait.
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